New Zealand’s largest city sits atop an active volcanic field that has erupted at least 53 times in the past 250,000 years. The catastrophic blasts felled forests and set the Auckland isthmus alight. The fire-fountaining cones and lava flows rode roughshod over the land. Scientists are not wondering if it will happen again, but what it will cost Auckland in lives and infrastructure when it does.

Magazine

Jan - Feb 2015

I have lived in Auckland, on and off, most of my life. Like most, I recognise its turbulent volcanic history only in passing. The cones and craters of Auckland’s 53 volcanic centres are landmarks, dramatic in scale but quiet in bearing—there are no plumes of steam or cauldrons of boiling mud as in Rotorua, no dramatic eruption events like on the Central Plateau. Yet the geological record makes clear that this is no benign place to establish a city—an eruption can occur at any time and almost any scale, with little or no warning.
If there was a pattern of activity in the Auckland Volcanic Field, it was blown to smithereens by the eruption of Rangitoto, which burst from the harbour and disgorged as much material as most of the previous eruptions put together.
The lack of knowledge concerning predicting and managing the volcanic hazard in Auckland was made clear during a Civil Defence exercise in 2008. Since then, scientists have invested thousands of hours in the field, taking rock and gas samples, measuring the noise of the city to image the subsurface, and trying to piece together evidence from the previous 53 eruptions in order to better understand the 54th.
The harder they look, the more they find.
While many answers have surfaced, some new and astonishing enigmas remain buried—and none buried deeper than a seismic anomaly found in the mantle beneath Auckland.
It was stumbled upon by chance just 10 years ago, as Geoff Chapple reveals in the feature in this issue.
Using reflected seismic waves from earthquakes thousands of kilometres away, geologist Nick Horspool and his team found what appeared to be an isolated hotspot some 80 kilometres beneath Auckland, like a knot of pressure beneath the city. Nobody knows how it came into being, but it’s quite likely that this is the source of magma for the Auckland Volcanic Field’s eruptions, though scientists can’t be sure. Nor do they know why the magma starts rising, or the conduits through which it may bolt—at some 20 kilometres per hour—to erupt in Auckland’s suburbs, city or sea. The prospect that so little is known of the foundations of the city might seem alarming, but this potential civil unrest may be a part of who we are.
In July 2014, 14 of Auckland’s volcanic cones returned to Māori management, to a new regional authority that will oversee the management of these maunga as icons of the landscape, and our collective culture.
Documentation presented by the authority refers to them as ‘tūpuna maunga’, acknowledging that these cones are as much a part of ancestry, perhaps, as forebears. For Auckland they are both a symbol of the volcanic threat, and to a great extent, a facet of our identity too—just as the earthquakes have become an inseparable part of the story of Christchurch and its inhabitants, for better or for worse.

The Old Ghost Road is the most spectacular and wild of all the cycle trails. From the ghost town of Lyell, deep in the Buller Gorge, it climbs steadily through native forest on a mining trail built in the 1870s. You will sweat your way past massive slips and archaeological sites, up to the stunted forest of the tree line, before breaking out onto what feels like the top of the world. The endless views stop you in your tracks, demanding to be admired —on a fine day. On a bad day, you’ll cower from the elements, reaching for every layer of clothing you have brought, because a storm on the Lyell tops is a powerful experience.
Beyond Ghost Lake, a 21-kilometre trail to Goat Creek Hut has been marked out, but has yet to be formed at the time of writing. Plans are for it to be upgraded to a rideable trail in 2014–15, but you should check the trail website for an update before assuming this middle section is ready for bikes. Until it is finished, the best options are there-and-back trips from either end of the Old Ghost Road.
From the northern end, at Seddonville, a historic trail heads up the Mokihinui Gorge, and in places is carved out of sheer rock face. It is every bit as stunning as the Lyell end, but a lot less hilly. The first 18 kilometres of the trail passes old mining ghost towns, almost completely reclaimed by the forest. From the Mokihinui Forks, the trail is brand new and weaves up the broad South Mokihinui Valley to Goat Creek Hut.

Invasive koi carp now writhe through wetlands from Auckland to Marlborough, displacing native species and destroying freshwater habitats. For 25 years, bowhunters in Waikato have ministered their own brand of pest control, the World Koi Carp Classic, resulting in prizes, and 70 tonnes of puréed fish.

Shortly after the February 2011 earthquake brought down Christchurch Cathedral’s bell tower, staff member the Rev Craig Dixon came across a brief mention of Shigeru Ban in a magazine. The Japanese architect was making a name for himself building temporary emergency structures out of unlikely materials. Among his works: a church for quake-damaged Kobe which, said the magazine, was significant not because it was quick to build, but because “its beauty among the wreckage was a sign of hope, and brought the community together”.
Dixon approached Ban for help in designing a stand-in Anglican cathedral for Christchurch, and the architect immediately offered his services at no cost. The result was a six-storey structure of exquisite lightness, fashioned largely from industrial-strength paper tubes, shipping containers and translucent polycarbonate sheets.
It is undoubtedly true, as Andrew Barrie suggests in Shigeru Ban: Cardboard Cathedral, that Ban is one of the biggest names in international architecture ever to work in New Zealand (this year, he received the most prestigious award in architecture, the Pritzker Prize). More importantly, as Barrie also claims, the cardboard cathedral is likely to gain global recognition as one of this country’s most architecturally significant buildings.
“The old cathedral was an essentially European building; the new one is essentially Pacific,” notes architect David Mitchell in the book’s afterword. “Some day we might see the Cardboard Cathedral as an architectural lighthouse, and thank Shigeru Ban for pointing us away from one past and into another.”
Published on the first anniversary of its opening, the beautifully produced Cardboard Cathedral is a fitting celebration of this symbol of Christchurch’s rebirth.

The Celebrated New Zealand botanist Leonard Cockayne was one of the first to preach the benefits of swinging a boot in the Great Outdoors. “Mountains are the noblest recreation ground, the finest school for physical and moral training, a source of perfect health to those who visit them, and the place of all places for enlarging our minds by the study of nature in Nature’s greatest laboratory", he wrote in 1900.
More than a century on, few would deny the reality of what might be called ‘the wilderness dividend’. Or of New Zealand’s unrivalled qualities as a trampers’ paradise. It has spec­tacular scenery, the world’s best hut and track network, easy access, an absence of dangerous wildlife, and no population pressure. And, unlike the European Alps or the Himalayas, New Zealand’s mountains have no inns and few alpine settlements. This, along with a challenging topography and unpredictable weather, forces a defining self-reliance.
That list is courtesy of Shaun Barnett and Chris Maclean, whose book Tramping: A New Zealand History charts the evolution of backcountry recreation. Drawing on personal experience, published accounts, notebooks and the photographs and recollections of fellow enthusiasts, Barnett and Maclean trace our growing love affair with wild New Zealand, beginning with the adventurous treks of the Anglican missionary William Colenso in the 1840s and culminating in the opening in 2011 of Te Araroa, a 3000-kilometre walking trail that stretches from Cape Reinga to Bluff.
It was inevitable, in such a young country, that missionaries, explorers, surveyors and fortune-hunters would kick off the whole enterprise by “walking with a purpose”— to borrow one of Tramping’s section headings. Among the best of them were the indomitable Charlie Douglas, whose knowledge of Westland was unsurpassed, and fellow explorer Arthur Harper. Both found time for fun—Douglas recording his pleasure at climbing an outlier of Mt Ragan in socks (his boots were not up to the job) and naming the prominence Stocking Peak, Harper noting the satisfaction both men got when, delayed by fog, they passed the time by dislodging large boulders and sending them crashing down the slopes. Pioneer Work in the Alps of New Zealand, Harper’s 1896 account of his exploits with Douglas, is considered the country’s first tramping book.
Many 20th-century trampers—prime ministers and labourers alike—saw them­selves as successors to the early settlers: individuals as competent and at ease in the bush and mountains as they were at the beach. But it was nevertheless some time before tramping as a leisure pursuit was widely accepted. Perhaps this had to do with its apparent aimlessness, compared with activities such as exploring or hunting. Undoubtedly, it was also due to the appear­ance of the trampers themselves. As Tararua Tramping Club’s Tony Nolan wryly noted, “their hobnail boots clattered and struck up sparks from the pavements, while their water­proof ‘slickers’ stank of linseed oil and stale woodsmoke... Tramping men were disdained as members of ‘The Great Unwashed’, while females were viewed with open suspicion, snubbed and given a wide berth on public transport.”
In the 1950s and 60s, tramping entered a golden age, reflected in the writings of John Pascoe, Geoffrey Orbell and the Dunedin publisher Alfred Reed, whose walking tours on “Maoriland byways” were related in a series of popular books. The number of national parks quickly grew from four to 10 within a few years of the passing of the National Parks Act (1952), and the New Zealand Forest Service entered the game in 1954 with the first of many State Forest Parks—Tararua. During these years, access to the wilderness became more affordable and the govern­ment embarked on a massive programme of hut building, track cutting and foot­bridge construc­tion. In 1960 alone, the Forest Service built an average of one backcountry hut a week, for the use of both deer cullers and trampers. Between 1957 and 1972, it chalked up 680 huts and shelters, 166 footbridges and cableways, and 4000 kilometres of tramping tracks.
Such was the success of all this activity that purists began to call for restraint, warning that the wildness of remote New Zealand was being tamed by over-develop­ment. The answer to what the New Zealand Alpine Journal called “the imperceptible whittling away of solitude” was the creation of ‘Wilderness Areas’, places free of huts and other amenities, without tracks or bridges or even the possibility of a helicopter drop.
Today, we have what the Americans call a ‘Recreation Opportunity Spectrum’— choices for experiencing the backcountry tailored to every need and ability, from fully formed paths to unmarked mountain routes. Cockayne’s noble recreation ground, great laboratory and training school has never been more accessible—or, given our increasingly urban and sedentary lives, more necessary.